IS EVERYBODY 100% POSITIVE THERE IS NO GOD?

I wanted to put this question out there to see how strongly everyone feels on this subject. Being that most of us trust in scientific fact and reasoning, I was wondering if everyone is absolutely, undeniably, 100% sure that a god doesn't exist. I personally take into account that there is no proof of any cosmic creator so therefore I am about 99.9999% sure that there is no god. However we all agree that science is an ever evolving field and I don't think that there will ever be any proof to support the existence of a supreme being, but I can't be 100% sure until there is concrete proof against one. I would like to know what all of your thoughts on this.

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100% is my level of positivity that the Universe had no creator god, and this is largely because the Universe’s ‘origins’, at their currently-debatable scientific level, lie within the realm of explicability by physics. Although one can never be absolutely sure of anything in matters of this kind, the base position is that no one needs to allow for or hypothesise a supernatural creator god because physics has already shown that it can produce credible scientific answers of its own. Instead, we further accept that in coming decades and centuries science will guide us ever nearer to the details of the likely truths.

In commenting on the theme of this discussion A/N members have provided an interesting array of commonsense rationalist opinions for which there is great virtue, but I go further and follow the fully-scientific, strong-atheist, approach which considers more deeply where the laws of physics and quantum mechanics currently lead us.

To start with, atheists at any rate agree that all the gods named by humans were invented by humans and they are 100% fake. Nothing less than 100% will do for these fictions.

Beyond this, as regards the origin of the known Universe, many atheists seem to proffer a degree of caution that leads them to posit something like 99.9999999+++….% positivity instead of 100% just in case there is something ‘divine’ out there behind the workings of the Universe and about which we have no knowledge. In that case, we need to ask what could it be? A creator god? Well, I say not. I side with those scientists and others who say we can dispense with any notion that there might have been any kind of creator god as a supernatural entity that set it all going.

Firstly, if there was some kind of creator god, we then spiral into the problem of the creator of the creator of the creator and so on to infinity (see older discussions in the "Origins" group, like “What happened before the Big Bang”). And if anyone were to say that some sort of creator god could have been there, or was always there, and still might be there (but where is ‘there’?), then one does far better to propound instead that the Universe has always been there. Thus, no creator god needs to be proposed, and in any case scientifically-satisfying explanations arise from within the domain of the theoretical quantum physics of cosmology.

Specifically, for the origin of the Universe I go along with physics professor Vic Stenger's analysis which is based on the virtual quantum properties of an unstable void (see "Origins" group discussions) for which the fundamental physics is above reproach. Using the test bed of quantum mechanics a reasonable theory is that the Universe was instantly self-created, uncaused, from an unstable void or ‘false vacuum’—which is a timeless quantum void—with the property that incipient, virtual particles were omnipresent.

The consequence is that in REAL TIME universes are all there can be. They are eternally present, forever existing, because their absence would imply an unstable state of the void that cannot exist in time. In brief, either "a Universe is present" or its alter ego "the unstable void” is present. However, a quantum void, because of its virtual particles and its instability, would immediately get replaced by a Big Bang and new Universe.

Therefore, because time cannot exist prior to universes, universes cannot have a first cause. With no first cause, there is no primary origin, no creation. Therefore postulations of the supernatural are superfluous, dispensable, worthless, and non-atheistic. Theism and doubt result from inadequate knowledge of science, and people’s gods including creator gods exist only in their heads. Godless atheism is the natural condition of the Universe into which all animal life including ourselves gets born, and life innocently proceeds with its god-free atheism until cerebral indoctrination into some ‘faith’ is pressured by super-gnats (supernatural believers) upon, most commonly, trusting defenceless children.

Although, like the stars, the proposed quantum void is not humanly approachable, its physics is within human understanding, because (as with the stars) it is entrenched in the theory of cosmological inflation [a result of the merging of quantum physics and high-energy particle physics with cosmology and astrophysics] which has abundant empirical evidence supporting it.
What is more, some theoretical physicists, who are working at the frontiers of research in these topics, suggest that our universe is only one of a possibly infinite set of "evolving" universes—hence the concept of the "Multiverse" or what I have termed the “Infiniverse”.

Thus as a 100% true atheist I support the 100% positive statement that “there is no god”. Critics of this expose themselves to a possible charge that a residue of the supernatural lurks within them.

BIOLOGOS FOUNDATION commenting on Prof. Vic Stenger:
“His 2007 New York Times bestseller, God: The Failed Hypothesis, is one of the foundational texts of the “new atheist” movement, which seeks to take a harder line against religious beliefs. In the book, Stenger argues that evidence from cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics shows there is no basis for belief in the existence of a deity”.

I'm way out of my comfort zone here, but my intuition is that the Superverse (the sum total of all universes) has "always been." Any other possibility I have heard or imagined begs the question of first causes, leading to the infinite regress you mentioned.

If I could wrap my brain around the math, it might seem logical to me, but I have to take such concepts (less makes more) somewhat on faith. The idea of a universe with no beginning for me is the lesser of two absurdities (but one of the two must be true, mustn't it? an endless chain of causes or an uncaused effect) -- hence my preference for the Superverse notion.

As far as the Universe goes (all of everything, not just the local expansion) it is either eternal or it changed state from the very simple state of nothing. Such a state change has to be unidirectional I think so it cannot return to the nothing state.

I'm not 100% sure that god does not exist. Perhaps there is a god of some kind out there but I can say with reasonable certainty that it is not the god of the bible or the koran.....or any of the religions that history has created so far.

I'd have to point out the definitional differences. I'm as certain that some magical universe creator doesn't exist, as I am that transdimensional pink faeries who enjoy checkers don't either, but that still isn't quite absolute.

However, if a god can exist, definitionally, which has only properties which operate within natural limitations, then I would say that the probability of that god existence, rapidly moves from near-impossible, to barely probable, and, if we were able to quantify the chances that such a thing might arise in the universe, it would being to move toward quite possible. Relying on the same math that could tell you that life existing elsewhere in the universe is quite reasonable. Of course, that all addresses existence, and that a god-like being might be skittering around somewhere in the universe is something which, even were it quite probable, would not make the atheist case less tenable, no more than that something quite like what we might call a unicorn could exist on some alien world.

Numerically speaking I'm about as sure as I think I can be that there is no existing diety. Most of us have been programmed to believe that something like that exists by parents, society, etc. and it can be hard to break old, ingrained habits.

No, I am not absolutely certain there is no god. I am not absolutely positive that unicorns have never existed. But "god" as an idea is a posited assertion. An assertion with no evidence to frame adequate arguments on its behalf, that I know of. So the burden of proof should never be shifted to the skeptic.

The most frequently cited arguments are arguments from ignorance ~~ the so-called "god of the gaps". Since we do not know what there was before the "big bang" that manifested our universe, GAWD must 'o done it ~ that sort of malarkey.